sowing the seeds of creativity

Tag Archives: art

I just saw this blog post by Jonathan Beaton. I am totally going to try making veggie paper. However, I think I’m going to use leftover pulp from my VitaMix when I’m done juicing. I don’t use a separate juicer, I just put my pulp through a mesh nut milk bag. I’ve been enjoying the juice and have either been composting the pulp or feeding it to my dogs, but it sometimes ends up with the consistency of homemade paper clay and I wonder about its potential as an art material! Has anyone experimented with this? I would probably add a little bit of soap flakes or something to inhibit mold growth, but I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. I can also see a potential use as a clay for making beads.

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This can be seen live tomorrow at A.R.C. gallery in Chicago, in the show “You Lookin’ at Me?” The theme of the show, as stated on the website, is this: “This exhibition will celebrate what we honor and admire and/or what we fear and disdain about ourselves. We are seeking images that deal with these issues. We seek to present a cast of characters. We want to feature various kinds of depictions, stylizations, comic book portrayals, straight portraits, abstractions, or however else you imagine yourself.”

It should be a great show. I’ll be at the opening tomorrow night, I hope to see you there!

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Here’s a video from the ARC Gallery 40th Anniversary Exhibition. It was great to reconnect with women from the gallery! I also attended a panel discussion the day after the opening. Past and current presidents were there to answer questions about the history, present and future of the gallery.

My piece is at 1:46-1:51 in the video, bottom right corner of the frame.The show is up for the next month so if you are in the Chicago area looking for something to do, stop by and see it!

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ARC Gallery and Educational Foundation is a women’s art gallery in Chicago, IL that has been going strong for the past 40 years. I have had the privilege to be a member and associate member back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. I think I was an associate member at the time of their 30th Anniversary. Although I haven’t been an active member in several years, this galley holds a special place in my heart. I was thrilled to be invited to be part of their 40th anniversary member’s show. The opening night is Friday, September 27. The photo doesn’t do the piece justice, so you’ll just have to come out and see it in person, along with the work of about 100 diverse women artists of all ages and walks of life. I am looking forward to seeing some folks I haven’t seen in a long time!

The post reminded me of funny story…when I was an art student in college I took figure drawing as required for my major. At the end of the semester my Italian Nonna wanted to see what I’d done over the semester so my Mom and I packed the car with my art to take it over to her. I started pulling out the nude figure drawings to leave them behind. My Mom said, “Why aren’t you bringing those? I think you should”. I was mortified. Show the nude drawings to my modest, religious little old grandma? But my Mom just said, “All those old churches in Italy have nudes in them. Let’s see how she reacts”. Reluctantly, I agreed to bring them. It turns out, she really liked them. Particularly a pastel drawing of a very handsome young man with nice buns.

It wasn’t until years later when I went to Italy on my honeymoon that I understood why Nonna was ok with her granddaughter drawing naked men. My Mom was right…it wasn’t just the frescos in the churches that had nude and semi-nude figures in them (and not all of them were stick-thin). There were centuries-old larger-than-life marble statues out in the streets like someone forgot to put them away. We never actually made it to see the David because the line was so long and there was so much else to see and yeah, there was a lot of nudity. But you didn’t think of it as overtly sexual, it was just amazing art depicting the beauty of the human form.

Now, It is possible my Nonna didn’t realize there was an actual naked handsome man in the classroom that the class was drawing. Or maybe she did.